Navigating Data Science: Sadie St. Lawrence

00:00:02:00 - 00:00:25:19

Narrator

At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity. How do you navigate forward? This podcast focuses on making smart choices in a rapidly changing world. We investigate the challenges of being at a crossroads and finding opportunities that arise out of disruption. Listen in on future forward conversations with the brightest luminaries, movers and shakers. Let's navigate forward together and create what's next.

00:00:25:21 - 00:00:50:02

Lisa Thee

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Navigating for a podcast. My name is Lisa Tharp and I'll be your host today. I have the honor of introducing you to one of the most energizing luminaries in the field of data science today. Sadie St Lawrence is the founder and CEO of Women in Data, an international nonprofit that is connecting the world of data scientists to each other to expand the impact that we can all have.

00:00:50:05 - 00:01:05:15

Lisa Thee

As a Coursera instructor, she has trained over 300,000 people in data science, and she has led multiple analytic transformations in corporate America and beyond. So with that in mind, I would love to welcome Stay to the podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

00:01:05:18 - 00:01:08:12

Sadie St. Lawrence

Thanks, Lisa. Excited to be chatting with you today.

00:01:08:14 - 00:01:21:17

Lisa Thee

XYZ, A pleasure. So could you tell us a little bit about your background? Where are you from and what do you think are some of the themes of your childhood that have helped shaped the direction you've taken?

00:01:21:20 - 00:01:40:16

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yeah. So first I always say that hindsight is 2020. So, you know, I don't know if it's that we look back and we pull the pieces of our story that relate to who we are now or it's vice versa. I haven't quite analyzed that problem enough to see if one is directional and causes the other, or if we pick the ones that add to our story.

00:01:40:19 - 00:02:11:03

Sadie St. Lawrence

But when I think about my childhood, it was a very curious and exploratory childhood. So I grew up on what we would call in Iowa and acreage, and people ask me, why do not call it a farm? And I said, Because it's only nine acres. And that's not big enough to classify as a farm. But people in California would consider that a farm that I grew up on, a farm in Iowa with six siblings, you know, multiple cows and cats and goats and chickens and all of that.

00:02:11:05 - 00:02:40:26

Sadie St. Lawrence

And it was really just a curious childhood. I was homeschooled, so I had a lot of time to really just explore. And given that I have so many siblings, I think my parents were very free in terms of how far they let us wander into the woods. And when I think back at some of the things that I did as a kid, I remember really vividly watching Grasshopper as there was a whole like flock, I guess, of them that came to our patio.

00:02:40:28 - 00:03:05:16

Sadie St. Lawrence

And I was watching them for an hour because I thought they were having babies because the way their breathing soon to find out insects do not birth babies, those is what that would be, what mammals do. And so just like always looking, tearing apart leaves, I would say chicken heads and dissect them. Just a very, very curious individual.

00:03:05:18 - 00:03:27:19

Lisa Thee

That makes sense to me how you would be drawn into the data science field down because there's a lot of pattern recognition in that. Right. So you were an observer of the natural world seeing how things were connected, seeing how things were influencing each other, and developing that deep curiosity and being able to hear your own wisdom by being in an environment that wasn't filled with technology and distractions and and structure.

00:03:27:26 - 00:03:49:09

Sadie St. Lawrence

Right, exactly. Yeah. I really reflect on those times and sometimes want to bring more of it back into my life. And so, you know, the struggle with that was that I didn't have an academic record though, so I always knew I wanted to go to college and educate myself, but I didn't really have any record. The first test I ever took was my A.C.T. test.

00:03:49:11 - 00:04:12:19

Sadie St. Lawrence

It didn't it didn't go very well considering that the first test I'd ever taken in my life. But thankfully I played the piano and was able to get into college by a piano scholarship. So they said, Hey, you have this skill, so we'll let you in, which was fantastic. I really loved exploring music, but when I was in university, I really then fell in love with science.

00:04:12:19 - 00:04:40:19

Sadie St. Lawrence

It was my first time taking science classes and soon switched over my major to psychology and started working in neuroscience labs. And really for my full undergrad was with the focus that I would go into neuroscience, get my Ph.D. in it, be a researcher, be a teacher, etc. So when I was finished with my bachelor's degree, I was working in a neuroscience lab studying emotional learning and memory.

00:04:40:21 - 00:05:00:19

Sadie St. Lawrence

And here I am working on rodents, you know, having to go into the lab every day, take care of them, run the experiments and in their emotions. And then at the end of the week, when we were done with the rodents, you know, you've taken care of them for however long of the experiment you have to euthanize throughout it.

00:05:00:21 - 00:05:21:21

Sadie St. Lawrence

And, you know, at first it was like in the name of science and just, you know, interested to learn. But there was a moment when I held the rat in my hand and it looked me in the eyes and we had like, this connection, like, I'll never forget, like when our eyes locked. And I just realized, like, Oh my goodness, you're a real living thing.

00:05:21:21 - 00:05:41:02

Sadie St. Lawrence

And I'm about to kill you. And like, I've been studying that you even have emotion. Like, how am I even able to do this? But I have this whole, like, coming, coming to Jesus moment of like, what am I really doing? So took a step back and said, okay, well, what parts of the job do I like? What do I not like?

00:05:41:04 - 00:06:14:22

Sadie St. Lawrence

I love the analysis, I love the data side of things. I love running experiments. What do I do? Not like working on rodents. I don't like how slow academic academia is. I don't like. No one's going to probably read my papers other than if you're data. So thankfully, I you know, I had Internet at that time and had Google, my most trusted advisor, somehow stumbled on the term data science in 2014 and was like, Yup, that's it, This is what I'm going to do.

00:06:14:25 - 00:06:22:14

Sadie St. Lawrence

Quit my job at the lab and got my first role in corporate America and started my master's degree.

00:06:22:16 - 00:06:45:22

Lisa Thee

What a fabulous story. And it connects on some of the three lines of how we've been able to build some opportunities together. The A.I. ethics field is absolutely on fire right now, and having people like you that have had that real world experience of saying, I know this is what it takes to be successful in my field, but the table stakes are a bit too high for my own core integrity.

00:06:45:25 - 00:07:17:04

Lisa Thee

I think it's incredibly valuable to bring it in out of an academic setting and into an in practice setting, because as we know, as people that have been deploying A.I. solutions in the wild, we don't know what we don't know yet, yet. And then secondarily, I think it's super interesting, as you talked about looking at your childhood and wondering, you know, chicken or the egg, what it includes, but how it led you here is I think it's really telling that data science wasn't even a field you could have studied had you gone to school at that time.

00:07:17:04 - 00:07:18:21

Lisa Thee

It didn't exist, right?

00:07:18:24 - 00:07:42:13

Sadie St. Lawrence

No. Yeah. And I think that's you know, a lot of times people will ask me, like, what should I be teaching my kids? And I'm like, Well, this career didn't even exist when I was a kid. So probably what they're going to do isn't even going to exist yet. So you really have to get back to those core principles of like curiosity and critical thinking and having good ethics.

00:07:42:13 - 00:07:50:21

Sadie St. Lawrence

Like those are the things that aren't going to go away no matter what, and that will make them adaptable to whatever the jobs of the next century are.

00:07:50:23 - 00:08:16:25

Lisa Thee

Absolutely. I think that this foundation laying for the next generation has to rely on persistence, flexibility and the ability to shift as the world's needs are shifting for how people engage in employment. So you have an amazing career journey. I'm not sure how you stuffed all of your accolades, and in the time that you've been doing this since 2014, can you help me understand what has inspired you to become more of a leader in your field?

00:08:16:25 - 00:08:29:22

Lisa Thee

I mean, now it's one thing to aspire to do it for yourself and get those traditional marks of success, but you've really invested lifting a whole community up with you. Can you share a little bit about what led you down that path?

00:08:29:24 - 00:08:50:06

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yeah. So I would first just say necessity is the mother, right? The mother of invention and creativity. And when I went in to data science, I, like most people, didn't research the demographics of the field to be like, Oh, is this a community that's like me and looks like me? It was like, No, I'm passionate about this. I want to do this.

00:08:50:06 - 00:09:12:28

Sadie St. Lawrence

I'm going to do it. Well, I did it and I got into it and I realized, Wow, where are all the women in this space? And why is there not more diversity and inclusion in this space? It was a very welcoming community from open source code, and I really loved the sharing of knowledge that was in it, something that I didn't experience as much in academia.

00:09:13:01 - 00:09:43:29

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so I'm like, this community loves to share knowledge, but we don't have a representation of the population. And it was really concerning to me because I could see that the path forward for businesses, everyone needed to be data literate. And so if you know, well, we're laying the groundwork, if that wasn't representative, like we were going to have major problems and inequalities and all this hope and promise of what was coming with data and technology, and I was not looking so bright in my mind.

00:09:44:01 - 00:10:06:24

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so, you know, it really started, which is like my own personal need for communities. If I was going to survive in this field, I knew I needed to be surrounded by others who were diverse thinkers and who also had that same passion, but also with the vision of like, how do we make this field in this industry more diverse in general?

00:10:06:26 - 00:10:21:04

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so I really look at it as those two sides of the coin, a personal, immediate need of like my need for community, and then a vision of like how what would I love the future of this space to look like?

00:10:21:06 - 00:10:47:07

Lisa Thee

Yeah, I very much share your point of view that data science and AI is going to have a disproportionate effect on all aspects of human life in the next 2050, whatever you want to say. Years it started. We're starting to see it in certain places and it will emerge into all vectors. And so having a representation of the people that are designing the systems that are frankly doing black box thinking in most cases is incredibly important.

00:10:47:07 - 00:11:03:22

Lisa Thee

So you can see it from different lenses and mitigate any unplanned risk that can come along. When you have uniform thinking with uniform experiences, it's just incredibly important to think, look at it from all the different angles, right?

00:11:03:24 - 00:11:28:08

Sadie St. Lawrence

For sure. And I think not just even in the creation of the the actual tools and algorithms, but also in the job opportunity. I mean, we look at and see how I think San Francisco is a great example of where these tech companies came in and it benefited a lot of people, but it also then changed in equality for a lot of other people.

00:11:28:08 - 00:12:01:26

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so when we look at it, this is the space to be in where the jobs are. You know, people talk about the jobs of the future and I'm like, no, it's not the future. It's here. It's right now. This is the present. And and this is where, you know, a lot more people could be in this field if they just got the pass code of like, no, this word actually means this and put those pieces together and get rid of all of the buzzwords that existed it and the feelings of making them feel like they are good enough or smart enough to be in a tech space.

00:12:01:28 - 00:12:24:27

Lisa Thee

I can totally relate to that. For the first two years that I worked in the data science field, tangentially, I would often remind myself that I am a native English speaker but wasn't quite sure I was following the language of these wonderfully trained academic PhDs all the time. But it is a lexicon and you get used to it just like you learn C++ or anything else.

00:12:24:27 - 00:12:56:12

Lisa Thee

And you know, the other thing I'm resonating with you is that making it accessible to people, coming to them where they are and getting to them to there, where they want to be. And that's actually why I chose to contribute to demystifying artificial intelligence for the Enterprise, the book that's coming out later this year, because we need all of our business leaders, we need all of our innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs to have access to understand how to leverage this really tool to accomplish ambitious goals.

00:12:56:15 - 00:13:00:28

Lisa Thee

It's an accelerant. It's not a solution on its own, right?

00:13:01:01 - 00:13:23:20

Sadie St. Lawrence

100%. I mean, I love that you call it a tool because really, that's what it is. And, you know, I've been a little bit saddened in the last couple of years with the field of data science, just because it is starting to get more standardized, which is a good thing. But I think in some ways, then we're leaving out some of those creative thinkers coming in and bringing in their knowledge and expertise.

00:13:23:20 - 00:13:42:20

Sadie St. Lawrence

And it's not data science isn't a a role. It's an overall tool that we use to analyze problems and critically think and come up with solutions and something that we all can apply to our life. Whether we're a business leader or an entrepreneur. Like all those skills are applicable.

00:13:42:22 - 00:14:02:11

Lisa Thee

I would love to hear a couple of examples of different goals you've applied to data science. Apply your data science expertise to to accomplish impact that you're looking for. Do you mind sharing an example or two with us? So maybe people that are listening that maybe might be more on that business side can connect with and go, Oh, that's how I can do it?

00:14:02:13 - 00:14:23:15

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yeah. So I love to talk about like at a very personal level how I use data science for my life. So I am a huge planner. People freak out because I have data on myself for the past six years and half an hour increments of what I've done every day. So people are like, Oh my goodness, you're a little.

00:14:23:15 - 00:14:26:09

Lisa Thee

Psycho researcher through and through.

00:14:26:11 - 00:14:48:15

Sadie St. Lawrence

There. It's in my blood. I can't get it out of me. But what I've learned from that process over time is so many people. I used to think it was that I was a planner and that, you know, I kept all this and I have these planning notebooks. But really what's actually more beneficial is what I do in the reflection process.

00:14:48:15 - 00:15:16:20

Sadie St. Lawrence

So I don't know, note everything of what I'm going to do, what I'll do is at the beginning of the day, the day before, I'll write in each of those half an hour is what I did that previous day. And so what that has allowed me to do is get past data, which is on myself, which then actually helps me predict the future of my trajectory, how I'm mapping towards my goals, where I'm likely to miss, etc..

00:15:16:20 - 00:15:35:26

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so when I look back at it, I was like, Oh my goodness, I'm applying data science methodology to the planning and goal setting of my life, where the first thing I realized is I have to have data on myself first to know what do you do all day? What do you do with your time? And then how do you start to optimize that time?

00:15:35:29 - 00:15:45:06

Sadie St. Lawrence

And for me, like now, the most important part is like, how good and accurate is that data that I have on myself? You know, very basic fundamental principles.

00:15:45:06 - 00:15:45:25

Lisa Thee

Of like.

00:15:45:27 - 00:16:00:09

Sadie St. Lawrence

Your data architecture, like where's, what's your quality of your data, right? And then that allows me to take some time to look at it, reflect on it, and predict the future of where I'm going and what's going to happen.

00:16:00:12 - 00:16:06:10

Lisa Thee

In fact, I believe the first time we got a chance to meet in person, you were about to embark on a think week, right?

00:16:06:12 - 00:16:07:07

Sadie St. Lawrence

You might share it with.

00:16:07:07 - 00:16:20:12

Lisa Thee

That's how you recharge your batteries, because you're obviously a driven, ambitious, impactful person in the world. I bet a lot of people wouldn't believe that. You take a full week to yourself.

00:16:20:15 - 00:16:41:29

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yes. This is something that it started back when I was in school in my master's program. There was the week between like Christmas and New Year's. That's, you know, pretty much no one's working. Some people call it Dead Week. And I was like, Oh, my goodness, this is the perfect time to reflect on the past year plan, the new year.

00:16:42:01 - 00:17:05:00

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so I made it, you know, just a week where I didn't have any meetings and I would try and go away somewhere, or at least, you know, let people know in the household like, don't disturb me, my door is closed. I am working. It is a week of work. So don't think that you're taking like this vacation, but it's a week of work to reflect on yourself.

00:17:05:02 - 00:17:26:04

Sadie St. Lawrence

And this is when I go through all the data. You know, I'll read like past years of my planners or current, you know, what is my trajectory or within the business going through and look at like all the financials, all the social media stats, everything that, you know, any data I can get my hands on and really use that time to just like soak it up.

00:17:26:07 - 00:17:51:17

Sadie St. Lawrence

And you know, what I've heard from a lot of people is like, oh, I've taken some kind of think, you know, days or hours, but they're like a whole week. And I was like, Yes, you have to do it for a whole week because that really allows it to like go into the details and soak in. And that's when those times when maybe you're in the shower of that think week is when like the magic happens, the ideas of what to do next.

00:17:51:17 - 00:18:08:18

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so those have gone from a yearly thing to now a quarterly thing. We'll see if they become a monthly thing. I don't know if I'll be able to fit that, but right now, a quarterly, quarterly think week is what works best for me.

00:18:08:20 - 00:18:28:12

Lisa Thee

I love that because I think we started in an economy in the fifties with like the thought of industrialization where everybody is valued as an asset by their time. And we're evolving into an information economy that really it's more the creativity you bring, it's really more the impact you can drive. And that's going to be the skills of the future.

00:18:28:12 - 00:18:52:20

Lisa Thee

And I think you're a reflection of that change in culture. And I've never met a woman who says, I didn't trust my instincts and it turned out great. Have you met her yet? Never. And I also have never seen anybody that can be in the tyranny of extreme busyness and numbing out with work that is able to hear their own inner wisdom at the times that they need to write.

00:18:52:23 - 00:19:11:21

Sadie St. Lawrence

Or create impact from that. I mean, you know, when we're so much in this go, go, go get things done and we're not really looking up and navigating our ship to say, okay, where's the bigger picture? Less of like, what are the tasks to run the ship on a day to day basis, but where are we really headed?

00:19:11:24 - 00:19:31:26

Sadie St. Lawrence

And I think if you're a leader of your organization, like I know you usually probably have some think time with your teams and brainstorming, but first and foremost, you need to get solid in your foundation. And that is what this is all about. And I think too often we bring a team together to have this session. We don't even know ourselves yet.

00:19:31:28 - 00:19:50:18

Sadie St. Lawrence

And so for me, like the first week is think week for me, and then my team knows that I'm going to come back with all these ideas and I'm going to be reared up and ready to go. And so that's then the time to bring other people together. But getting solid in your foundation is like first and foremost, most important.

00:19:50:21 - 00:20:02:24

Lisa Thee

I love that. So you have you're seeing all the emerging trends on the front lines of data science today. Do you mind sharing with us topics that you think we should all be paying a little bit more attention to?

00:20:02:27 - 00:20:23:14

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yeah, So one of the things I see is just how easy it is to access the field. So if when I look back in the past seven years in data science, you know, one the tools we have used have changed the language we have used, but the knowledge that we have in the field, it is so much higher.

00:20:23:14 - 00:20:52:23

Sadie St. Lawrence

So before you know your coding models from scratch we were using are, you know, now we have Python and there's all of these packages in libraries just out of the box. In addition to that, there's so many gooey tools as well. That's really just the click and drag and drop. And so where I'm seeing it going is focusing less on the tools and the technology because that's really easily accessible and more on that business impact.

00:20:52:23 - 00:21:16:22

Sadie St. Lawrence

Like how do we really that's where the next frontier is. Like how do we manage data science as an actual product? How do we make sure everyone in the organization has an understanding of this tool? How do we make sure that we're creating impact from it and not getting lost in the details of architecture diagrams? Who's going to own what and how are we going to do it?

00:21:16:24 - 00:21:33:16

Sadie St. Lawrence

Because it's so it's really not as complex as we make it to be. What is complex is the strategy of it, how we integrate it into our business and, you know, the culture that we have within our business to use it.

00:21:33:19 - 00:22:01:27

Lisa Thee

And just to build on an example of that, when I was running my company, Minor Gard, we had a summer intern who had come in to do marketing and communications for us. And so her background was she was a romance language major in college. She was a junior and she was coming into a tech company for the first time, and our data scientist took her under her wing and taught her python over the summer, and she realized it was pretty much as easy as learning French and Italian was.

00:22:01:27 - 00:22:32:21

Lisa Thee

It's just another language. And she was able, as her final project for school that year, to use Python and Tableau to automate all of her homework for her senior year thing. She was doing manual sentiment analysis of romance novel or of novels and romance languages, and she was able to prove that with her predictive analytics she did in Tableau that it matched her manual assessment of it.

00:22:32:24 - 00:22:34:27

Lisa Thee

Who knew?

00:22:34:29 - 00:22:55:03

Sadie St. Lawrence

And that's exactly what we need, right? We need people from these diverse backgrounds coming in and saying, Oh, I can use it in this way. Like we have to stop thinking about business and tech as two separate things. I mean, it's crazy to me that these are even thought of as two separate things because technology is a tool.

00:22:55:03 - 00:23:04:18

Sadie St. Lawrence

We're all a part of the business. And so bringing those together, sharing knowledge and that cross training is so valuable.

00:23:04:20 - 00:23:18:16

Lisa Thee

So say that you've accomplished so much. What are you most proud of personally in terms of what you've accomplished either in your career or in your teaching or in your nonprofit leadership? What comes to mind?

00:23:18:18 - 00:23:44:19

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yeah, So I really love actually small data, which is kind of funny because in the realm that I work in and working with a lot of big data, right? And you know, a lot of things. I think in our culture today we are more attracted to the big numbers, like we talk about how many chapters we have in women in data and how many members and all of this.

00:23:44:22 - 00:24:20:22

Sadie St. Lawrence

But really, like what makes me super proud is the small data of one person's individual stories and I think what I'm most proud of in that regard is just individual stories of lives who change when you give them access to tools and technology that they can use to make their life better. And so we've seen that in women in data where, you know, women were who were in abusive relationships and couldn't earn an income, were able to train themselves in this field, get a high paying job, leave that relationship and create a better life for them themselves.

00:24:20:22 - 00:24:37:04

Sadie St. Lawrence

And then their family. And so when I think about, like, what makes me most proud, it's like it's those stories, it's this, it's so little individual pieces of data that really are what makes me come alive and wake up in the morning and wanted to all of this over again.

00:24:37:06 - 00:24:55:01

Lisa Thee

At the end of the day, we're all wired to connect. And driving that human impact, I think is a shared passion of myself and you and launch consulting. That's where we really focus because at the end of the day, the tools are a means to an end. It's how do you help the humans do what they need to do uniquely to get there, right?

00:24:55:04 - 00:24:56:01

Sadie St. Lawrence

Definitely.

00:24:56:03 - 00:25:27:26

Lisa Thee

Yeah. So how do you keep the key priorities that you have? Top of mind for decision makers? Sometimes ethics isn't top of mind. Sometimes diversity in tech isn't top of mind, sometimes helping domestic violence survivors isn't what drives the the bottom line of the piano. How do you help keep that impact in mind? Because you've been incredibly effective at it at places like Accenture, at places like VSP, Health Care, you have led teams in-house.

00:25:27:26 - 00:25:37:19

Lisa Thee

You've consulted externally, and you've been incredibly impactful by speaking other people's languages in the way that they need to hear it. So can you share a little bit of that wisdom with us?

00:25:37:22 - 00:26:01:09

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yes, I think first and foremost is just slow down like I love one of Rene Brown's principles of like getting rid of that hustle culture and the need to be busy. And I think so often in business, like we have this idea that if we don't move fast right, like it's a very startup kind of tech culture, right?

00:26:01:09 - 00:26:25:24

Sadie St. Lawrence

It's like move fast and break things, right? And I'm like, well, I don't I mean, that may happen, but like, I don't really want to break things. And so my whole goal and, you know, how I've grown and women in data is talking about how do we scale sustainably? And I think a lot of that, if we keep these higher things top of mind, it really comes down by first by taking a step back and slowing down, right?

00:26:25:29 - 00:26:47:06

Sadie St. Lawrence

Stop getting lost in the day to day of that to do lists and task and think of like overall objectives of like what is the company impact that we're trying to make? Are we achieving that? And how do we make sure that like we're doing it in an ethical and sustainable way that takes deep thought? These are not questions.

00:26:47:09 - 00:27:08:05

Sadie St. Lawrence

If they were questions we all had answers for, we probably already have automated at this point, but we have it. And why are we having is because it takes conscious, deep thought and collaboration. And to do that you have to slow down and don't ever think that you're going to miss anything or lose anything from that. I think all of us have a little bit too much FOMO.

00:27:08:05 - 00:27:32:27

Sadie St. Lawrence

Exactly. But but I have in times look at the sequoia trees and look and see like these are things that aren't fast and growing, but they've lasted a lifetime and they've lasted a lifetime because they're a part of a network that bonds together and they take each one day at a time. And I think sometimes we look too much for small turn gains versus long term rewards.

00:27:32:27 - 00:27:41:04

Sadie St. Lawrence

And if we slow down, it allows us to get rooted in that which is going to be sustainable for the long term.

00:27:41:06 - 00:28:10:14

Lisa Thee

Boy, it sounds like that time growing up, immersed in nature and has really benefited you in terms of wisdom well beyond your years, it is really inspiring to hear that how you're seeing things. It took me a lot longer of hitting my head against the wall to figure some of that stuff out, and so it gives me a lot of hope for our future with emerging leaders like you said, that are that are taking the charge forward.

00:28:10:17 - 00:28:37:28

Lisa Thee

I also want to share just a little nugget of knowledge that I heard somewhere. I'm not going to cite it properly, but I know somebody at Pivotal Ventures shared it with me. So it was research informed. Is that the most common method to get into a job in the data science field? If you don't graduate from an Ivy League school, is barista Apple Tech support then major tech company with software engineer, big, big job.

00:28:37:28 - 00:29:01:13

Lisa Thee

So I want to demystify some of that process for people that maybe don't have the academic record you mentioned across your first test or maybe don't have the financial support to not be sustaining themselves as they're progressing through their career journey. You know, the barista skills get you interacting with customers and getting you really comfortable with all the different ways you have to be in the world.

00:29:01:15 - 00:29:26:00

Lisa Thee

And then Apple support really values all this great customer service skills, and we'll teach you the technical chops and you can self learn. As you mentioned, you're on Coursera with data science classes. Do you mind demystifying a little bit of that piece of things? If people wanted to have free education in this space that can show that they're capable and worth taking a chance on how Coursera or things like that can be a tool for them?

00:29:26:03 - 00:29:50:08

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yeah. So I actually before I started my master's program, I started courses on Coursera just to see if I even liked it. And that really was what led me to get into the field because I soon found I really enjoyed it. And that's what led me to go get my master's today. I really don't feel like, you know, I think if I was doing it all again, I wouldn't probably get my master's.

00:29:50:08 - 00:30:16:24

Sadie St. Lawrence

There's so much information out there now. It was, you know, a different time six, seven years ago. And so I see so many people who are able to take some classes part time. They maybe switch up their job a little bit so they have a little bit more free time. I think that's where the barista works. Well, it's like, hey, I'm able to pay my bills, but it gives me some more free time, which allows me to study and allows me to network.

00:30:16:27 - 00:30:43:00

Sadie St. Lawrence

But it is possible. And I think a lot of it though, comes down to is really like the community that you're a part of. So like I've only ever applied to one job, but that was the first job I had out of college. And then from there, like my network has carried me and I think that's like a main thing I want people to understand is like it comes through your network and not only through your network of getting the job, but also knowing what to learn.

00:30:43:01 - 00:30:55:29

Sadie St. Lawrence

Okay, you've taken this class, you liked it. There's a lot of information out there. So having people you can bounce ideas off of and collaborate with is going to make sure that you find that success in getting the job you want.

00:30:56:02 - 00:31:08:29

Lisa Thee

Okay. And how can people support your work? Maybe if they're not interested in pursuing this field, but interested in supporting people like you and people that you're lifting up through your community. Do you have any suggestions on ways people can be supportive?

00:31:09:05 - 00:31:33:22

Sadie St. Lawrence

Maybe you want to become a mentor? We're always looking for mentors. That's a great way to give back. Another option is just, you know, sharing that women in data is available and sharing it with your friends and family who it may be useful for. You can also participate through different corporate sponsorships and partnerships and then also becoming a member.

00:31:33:22 - 00:31:36:06

Sadie St. Lawrence

So definitely a lot of ways to get involved.

00:31:36:09 - 00:31:41:01

Lisa Thee

Wonderful. And if I'm not mistaken, you host your podcast now, correct?

00:31:41:03 - 00:32:07:23

Sadie St. Lawrence

Yes. So we have a podcast called the Data Bites Podcast. We share stories of people in the industry and then just also career tips and career advice for those who are looking to get in the field. They're looking to move into management in the field. Yeah. So women in data, you can find us at women in data dot org and then you can connect with me on any social media platform or on my website.

00:32:07:23 - 00:32:12:29

Sadie St. Lawrence

Is that Sadie St Lawrence Yeah. Happy to connect with anybody.

00:32:13:01 - 00:32:21:28

Lisa Thee

Well, thank you so much for being here today, Sadie. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And it always is. And we look forward to continuing the conversation in the future.

00:32:22:01 - 00:32:25:16

Sadie St. Lawrence

Sounds good. Thanks so much for having me.

00:32:25:19 - 00:32:36:19

Narrator

Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to the Navigating Forward podcast. We'd love to hear from you at a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity, how do you navigate forward? We'll see you next time.